crystalhallfandomcom-20200216-history
Creating a Story Page
This is going to be a bit more informal than most policy pages, since it’s a description of how I (XaltatunOfAcheron) do it. It was originally a byproduct of creating timeline pages for the story, but it's grown to where it handles pretty much everything having to do with a story. Work Organization I keep a number of pages of info open in my text processor (TextEdit on Mac OS). They’ve got catchy names like “Unnamed 1” through “Unnamed 6”. That first page is where I do most of the writing; the other pages are essentially templates where all I have to do is fill in the information. I don’t have to write the structure each time. When I start work on a story, I capture two pieces of information on each part. These are the URL (gotten from the browser) and the posting date (either from the forum list or the story itself - they aren’t always the same). I also save the story itself in my Downloads folder (which is where the browser wants to put it on Mac OS). All these pieces will be needed later, so I simply do it up front. Second Read I read the story three times. The first is to get the story straight in my head. I don’t take notes or anything. The second read is where I build the day-by-day summary. I’ll grant that this may not be the best way of creating a well-crafted and readable summary, but remember that this is a byproduct of creating timeline pages - and that’s the way the timeline is organized. Each day entry has the date and the day of the week (needed later) as the header. It may have a line that gives the location (as - - > location). Then it’ll have a paragraph or so for each scene. Links are somewhat haphazard at this stage. Third Read The third read is to fill in the Characters section. I simply go through the story again, creating a line for each character on the first appearance. I also put in a few words about the character, and (almost) always note whether the character is mentioned or minor or deceased, etc. In most cases the format is: link name, dash, real name, dash comment. The big exception here is that I pull characters together that are related by a family, or being on a team or whatever. This introduces them out of order, but it makes it a lot easier to relate them to team or family names. Put in story format I next copy what I’ve got to a second page that has a story header. I update the header and then go through the story doing formatting. When I’m done with that, it gets added to the Wiki and gone through with the Preview feature. I find problems there - guaranteed. Do not skip preview. I also check links, sometimes with a second tab that also has the wiki open. Add a posting comment and categories. There are three that are standard: “Stories”, the name of the author, and Gen 1 or Gen 2. Hit publish and pray. Dated Stories entry I’ve got a page with a number of dated stories entries. I edit them for this story. At this point, there’s only one piece of needed information that’s missing: the word count. getting the word count I go to the Download folder, which should have a copy of the Html for each part. I rename them to something a lot shorter. I go to my command line (that’s Terminal on Mac OS) and use the textedit command to convert them from Html to txt. That’s a Mac OS specific command. There are a number of commands that will do something similar on unix/linux systems. I have no idea of an equivalent on Windows, although there is supposed to be a piece of browser Javascript that will work. Now that they’re in text format, I hand edit them to remove the front matter and everything after the end, including comments if any. Then I run the wc command (standard on Mac OS and unix/linux) on the edited text. Onward! Now that we’ve got the word count, we’re ready to stick the formatted entry into one of the sortable story tables. Again, remember to check your work with Preview. That’s shown me too many gaffes for comfort. Timeline Now, we’re ready to do the timeline. I have templates for the various timeline pages on one of my scratch pages, so it’s more or less fill-in-the blanks time. The hard part is updating existing date pages; this may take some creativity and research to determine where events in this story fit into what’s already there from other stories. There’s more about the timeline on the Timeline format page. Characters The next thing is to extinguish all the red-links on the characters section by creating character pages for them. There's sort of a template, but I use a very abbreviated format. Indexes The final piece is to update the indexes. At present, there are five of them that are active (these are the logical names): *Code name index *No code name index *Gen 1 student index *Gen 2 student index *Entity index Category:Policy